This course is a graduate-level course about recent operating systems research, with a focus on datacenters. We read and discuss research papers and students complete a research project. This quarter we will read papers about a variety of topics: multicore operating systems, network stacks, scheduling, memory management, disaggregation, sustainability, and new devices such as SmartNICs, FPGAs, GPUs, and TPUs.
The goals of this course are:This course is open to PhD and Masters students as well as advanced undergraduate students. Students should have completed CSE 221 prior to enrolling, or else should have experience with operating systems and with reading research papers.
Each class has 1-2 assigned papers. Students are expected to read the papers ahead of time, submit a short review about each paper (by 11:59 pm the evening before), and come to class prepared to discuss! Classes will be interactive and everyone is expected to participate.
Each student will lead the discussion of one paper, either individually or with a partner. Students will share their discussion outline with the instructor at least two days before the discussion so that they can receive feedback on it.
The goal of this assignment is to familiarize students with CloudLab, so that they may use it as an experimentation platform for their research projects.
A major component of this course will be an open-ended research project, conducted individually or in groups of 2-3 students. Students will submit a brief project proposal and a final project write-up, and will also give an in-class presentation about their project at the end of the quarter.
| Date | Topics | Papers | Slides |
|---|---|---|---|
| Th 9/28 | Course overview, intro to CloudLab | Intro | |
| Tu 10/3 | Multicore | Multikernel (SOSP '09) | Multicore |
| Th 10/5 | Network stacks | IX (OSDI '14), XDP (CoNEXT '18) | Network stacks |
| Tu 10/10 | RDMA and RPCs | FaRM (NSDI '14) | RDMA and RPCs |
| Th 10/12 | RDMA and RPCs | eRPC (NSDI '19), PRISM (SOSP '21) | Datacenter networking |
| Tu 10/17 | no class | ||
| Th 10/19 | Congestion control | Homa (SIGCOMM '18), Swift (SIGCOMM '20) | Datacenter congestion control |
| Tu 10/24 | CPU scheduling | Killer Microseconds (CACM '17), Shenango (NSDI '19) | CPU scheduling |
| Th 10/26 | CPU scheduling | ghOSt (SOSP '21) | CPU scheduling |
| Tu 10/31 | Performance diagnosis | NSight (NSDI '22), Fathom (SIGCOMM '23) | none |
| Th 11/2 | NIC interfaces | EnsÅ (OSDI '23) | NIC interfaces |
| Tu 11/7 | Datacenter tax | Accelerometer (ASPLOS '20) | Datacenter tax |
| Th 11/9 | SmartNICs | AccelNet (NSDI '18), iPipe (SIGCOMM '19) | SmartNICs |
| Tu 11/14 | GPUs and TPUs | TensorFlow (OSDI '16) | GPUs and TPUs |
| Th 11/16 | FPGAs | Coyote (OSDI '20) | FPGAs |
| Tu 11/21 | Disaggregation | LegoOS (OSDI '18), Memory disaggregation (SOSR '23) | Disaggregation |
| Th 11/23 | Thanksgiving holiday | ||
| Tu 11/28 | Memory management | Llama (ASPLOS '20) | Memory management |
| Th 11/30 | Miscellaneous topics | OS Verification (HotOS '23), Reducing Embedded Carbon (HotCarbon '23) | Miscellaneous |
| Tu 12/5 | Project presentations | ||
| Th 12/7 | Project presentations |